While the Canadian government is considering restoring the federal prison farm program, a Kingston-based group is urging the government to scrap its animal agriculture programs and instead use more sustainable agricultural practices and compassion-based rehabilitative programming.

The group believes that the combination of plant-based agriculture and farm animal sanctuary — the permanent, non-exploitive care of animals — represents a forward-thinking alternative to the dairy and meat operations of the past. According to the coalition, “Canadians recognize the therapeutic merits of sanctuary and ecological stewardship, and the conflicts inherent in animal agriculture as a rehabilitative model.”

The coalition says that most Canadians are perplexed at the thought of prisoners being trained to care for cows while being taught that it is acceptable to harm, coerce and kill them. According to the campaign, that creates what sociologists call the “care-kill” paradox, which leads to high rates of moral ambivalence, cognitive dissonance and psychological disorder among workers in animal-use industries.

“It is not the type of work that we should be training inmates to do,” Amy Fitzgerald of the University of Windsor, said in a news release.

“I therefore strongly recommend that animals only be incorporated in correctional environments in a manner that fosters empathy for them [such as animal sanctuary programs] and not through animal agriculture, which by design serves to objectify and truncate empathy,” she said.

A “Save the Herd” petition calling for sanctuary for Kingston’s “Pen Herd” cows has more than 8,000 signatures.

For more information on the campaign, go online to www.evolveourprisonfarms.ca.